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How Has Advertising Changed In The Early 1900s

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Changes in Automobile Advertisements from 1900-1935

David Ogilvy, the father of advertising said, “Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.” In the early 1900s the automobile industry and brand was starting off and rapidly changing in many ways. Thusly, it makes sense that the automobile advertisements changed at the same rate as the industry. Automobile advertisements changed drastically in the early 1900s in order to keep up with the new roles of cars, to cater to different audiences, and to stay current with new technology. At the beginning of the 20th Century, cars were a new, revolutionary concept. When cars were first created, their goal was to simply be a faster, easier …show more content…

Walter Thompson, “Will Your Car Do This?” advertisement was formatted with huge blocks of text, statistics, and graphs explaining how each piece of the car worked . The advertisement also made sure to touch on safety and compared the inspection process of cars to those of an elevator in order to connect the new vehicle with a familiar and comfortable idea. However, once cars became more prevalent and weren’t so new anymore, they adapted the function to show status. Thusly, in 1911, Baker Motor Vehicle Co. came up with an advertisement titled, “The Social Prestige of Baker Electric” . This advertisement portrays a Baker Electric car parked in front of the Orchestra Hall, surrounded by upper class men and woman on the street in order for the viewers to associate the car with prestige. In Susan Strasser’s Essay on modern advertising, she wrote that in this time period “the goals of advertising shifted from an emphasis on providing information to an attempt to influence buyers by any means possible” . Advertisements used to only display a picture of the car with statistics, but the new change was placing the car in a scene to correlate and associate emotions. In this case the goal was to associate a brand with the top of the social hierarchy. However, during the 1920s, the role of automobiles shifted

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